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“You were asleep.”
“You’re mad at me because I went to sleep?”
“I’m not mad.”
He eyed her. “Yeah, okay.”
“Look, are you going to put on a shirt, or do you figure, you know, nothing Larissa hasn’t seen before?”
He swiped up his shirt, surprised. Well, she was jealous. Had she been jealous back then and hidden it?
“I guess Larissa was probably super on-board with your vanilla sex preference, wasn’t she?”
He shrugged into his shirt, feeling embarrassed, because he was thinking about having sex with Larissa. “I mean, we never had any conversations about sex.”
Sex with Larissa had been fine.
Nothing like this, whatever the sex was he had been having with Essence had been tonight, sex that stretched against his comfort zone and made him feel like he was imprinting on her. Sex that felt intense and transcendent. There was no comparison really. Should he say that, or would that mean Essence realized he was thinking about having sex with Larissa?
“You were always complaining about her,” said Essence, her voice muffled.
“Was I?” He looked up to see that Essence was bent over, shoulders hunched, picking at one of her fingernails. She was closing in on herself, all of the sudden. It was because of Larissa in some way. “Well, I guess I didn’t really like her. And you just said she was a gossip.”
“I mean, she is,” said Essence. “But she’s nice. I do like her. Why don’t you like her? There’s nothing wrong with her.”
He was so confused right now. “Um… okay, why are we talking about what I think of Larissa?”
“The sex was fine, you just said. And she used to cook for you all the time. You brought all this leftover food with you to work for lunch, months of these insane, gourmet meals all packed up in these little containers. She did that for you. She packed your fucking lunches.”
His wings twitched. “Uh, it wasn’t… she just cooked a lot, and she said that she was trained to cook for a lot of people, so she was always making too much, and she would beg me to take things because they were going to go bad if no one ate them. She did it to everyone. When we had dinner with her family, she brought all this food along and made them all take it home with them.”
Essence folded her arms over her chest, glaring at him. “Right. Sure. You have all these excuses.”
“Do I? What am I making excuses for?”
“For being so hard on her!”
“Was I hard on her?” He spread his hands. “I mean, Essence, you hung out with me and Larissa only a handful of times—”
“Once a week for months,” said Essence.
“No, not really.”
“We all went out for wings on Wednesdays.”
“And you always left right away to meet Zebedee. And the whole time you were there, you were checking your phone to see if he texted you.” He was surprised that his tone got so oddly bitter about that. He was still jealous of Zebedee, apparently. Or maybe it was the whole sour interaction earlier in the night, which made anger go through him again.
“Okay, this is not about Zebedee, because I’m not with him anymore.”
“I’m not with Larissa either,” he said.
“No,” she said. “You’re not. And you still haven’t explained to me why you dumped her.”
“You know, I’m kind of fuzzy on the details of us breaking up, actually,” said Decker.
“How could you be fuzzy? It wasn’t even that long ago.”
“Yeah, I feel like we just kind of drifted apart.”
